Severance
by Dr.Wiggy
Summary: The superpowers of the world have a slight diplomacy fallout, literally. Now Sara has to brave the wilderness of a seemingly primeval boreal forest to discover the fate of her twin, Tegan. This contains quincest, if you disapprove please do not read.
1. Chapter 1

A Small Note and Disclaimer: I would just like to formally state that I, in no way, wish harm upon Tegan or Sara. This is merely a work of speculative fiction, nothing more. Also, this story will contain incest and homosexual relations. If you disapprove of these situations, then please do not read the text below, you have been forewarned.

Now that that is out of the way, welcome to my small experiment. This started as a simple exercise to flex my proverbial writing muscles before National Novel Writing Month. Now I have decided to try and finish it. I also wanted to attempt to meld sci-fi with Tegan and Sara effectively, let us all hope I am successful.

If you feel so inclined, please leave a review, I would absolutely adore constructive criticism.

**Chapter One: REM**

Quiet.

All was quiet.

The silence enclosed around her very being. This quiet was in no sense calming, but seemed odd and unnerving. She groped in the darkness as she felt her uneasiness inhibit her process of thought. This complete lack of noise felt corrupt, as if robbing every semblance of life from the very air she breathed.

Her eyelids snapped open as she aroused from her unconscious state. Her senses instantaneously overloaded with information. Her eyes saw naught but a rough, ash grey material underneath her and her neurons transmitted only pain as she felt it claw at her searching hands.

_Asphalt?_

Her olfactory system was bombarded by the scent of something she could not quite place, especially in her addled state, burning. However, the sound did not return, silence filled what space was left in her mind further dislodging her train of thought. She did not need an explanation as to why she was lying face down on pavement, nor why something was burning so nearby. She simply needed noise, anything to break this suffocation.

She brought her hands forward, steadying herself against the unforgiving surface of what she lay upon, as she levered her body onto her knees. Not even removing her gaze from her feet, she rose upward on shaky knees, only then did she see.

Wreckage and destruction were in every direction she looked. The ruins of buildings, most nothing but piles of rubble, lined the fissured road beneath her. After surveying her surroundings, she started to recognize some of the annihilated establishments. But Montreal, a city that embodied life and brimmed with culture, could not have been reduced to this wasteland.

Anxiety began to set in, her mind racing; she moved her hands to her midriff desperately clenching the fabric of her T-shirt she found there. Wait her mind beseeched, she had never done this before, and this action born of worry was not her habit but another's.

_Then why does it seem so familiar?_

Her mind searched for the answer, she could envision the individual make out her movements as they eventually came to mimic her position, but their name eluded her. She grasped the cloth harder and closed her eyes whilst she concentrated. She remembered the hard consonants in their name, and how they once so easily fell from her mouth. Then the first syllable leapt from the confines of her memory, rejoicing at her fortune, she moved her lips to speak it aloud.

"TeGAAAH!"

A sharp pain erupted from her chest, taking all of the breath from her lungs. Her hands flew from her abdomen to her chest where the agony had originated. She gasped for oxygen, stumbling forward, and tried to stay upright. The pain came once more, causing her body to jolt onward. Confusion caused her attempt at recollection to be completely disregarded as she focused her attention on this mysterious affliction. It felt as if someone had attached a rope to her sternum and viciously tugged her in the direction of their choosing. The sudden hurt continued at regular intervals, causing forward movement each time. She shifted her view upward and saw where she was forcefully being led. She proceeded toward her destination voluntarily, finding that the pain lessened to a reasonable amount. The remains of what seemed to be an old record store lay before her, in better shape than the ones skirting it, but in major disrepair nonetheless. The display window was shattered, only the skeletal remains of the structure were left.

_Then how do I know it was a record store?_

Before she could even begin to fathom an answer, she encountered her first obstacle. She saw them out of her peripheral vision. They, and parts of them, were strewn about the immediate area in all different poses and fashions, like some macabre children's playroom. She had to keep moving forward lest the pain return in full force. She cautiously stepped over one of them; at this proximity she could see the scorch marks marring their bodies. Their faces or at least what resembled faces, upturned in an eternal cry of anguish. This horrifying display only quickened her pace. She hoped that inside this desolate building there may be some haven away from the bodies and stench of death. Finally, she crossed what she presumed was the foyer of the store. Inside, everything was in disarray. Racks, partitions, and merchandise that covered the floor made walking slightly problematic, but she made it to the center of the room with little problem and set about surveying the room.

_What in here is so damn important that I get my rib cage ripped out?_

The pain, now only a dull throb, flared up in a guiding manner as she moved towards the back of the room. There, behind a toppled CD display was one of them. This one was sprawled on the once carpeted floor, lying upon her stomach. The moment she saw them the feeling of familiarity returned. She needed to end this infuriating game immediately. She grabbed onto them and, using all her might, flipped them so they faced the ceiling.

She gasped for breath, already weakened by the pain in her chest. She felt as though she had just lifted a great amount of weight. She lazily focused on their feet and the ratty Converse that they wore. Those she knew far too well. An unexplainable sense of panic gripped her as she tore her gaze upwards to the rest of their body, covered by ostentatious purple pants and a black T-shirt. Their arms, once pale and tattooed, now held only gruesome burns that exposed their charred muscle to the unrelenting air. Finally she looked upon their face and a profound gloom wormed its way into her subconscious.

The defined jawline,

_No…_

The full lips now cracked and bloodied

_No, No, No_

Glassy, hazel eyes staring into the void above them,

_Please, no…_

The windswept, singed locks fell across the forehead of a face so similar to hers, yet altogether different. She pondered this feeling of dread. Why should she care about the fate of one of them? Then the pieces began to fall into place. She had walked down this road before this store was but a few blocks from her former residence, an apartment in Vancouver. But, she was not alone in that flat, she shared it with someone. Someone who loved to visit this very store to fawn over instruments they couldn't afford and debate over each other's taste in music, the very same person who had a habit of grasping their shirt in moments of distress. Suddenly the feelings of familiarity made sense; she had lived with whoever lay before her. She inhaled sharply at this revelation, her eyes widening to extreme proportions as the name finally wrenched itself free of her limbic system. This broken, dilapidated cadaver was her twin sister and muse, Tegan.

Just as quickly as the silence arrived, it was shattered by Sara's tortured scream of sorrow as the pain in her chest increased tenfold, bifurcating her very soul.

The sound of a metallic collision resounded throughout the abandoned home. Sara sprang from her resting position, quickly grabbing the hunting knife that lay nearby and shifted her body to face towards the source of the din in a singular movement. Chest heaving in surprise, Sara glanced about the room fervently trying to locate what caused the raucous clamor. After her sight adjusted to the dark, she saw the steel bucket that served as her dinner table was toppled over onto its side. She let her guard down, assuming that she must have kicked it over during her fitful sleep.

Sara wearily dropped back to the floor, every night since she received that last phone call from Tegan her dreams were invaded with all of the possible outcomes of their current situation. Never much of an optimist, few of those dreams were of them actually reuniting and living happily ever after. She rested the back of her head against what was left of the deteriorating wall behind her and attempted to get some rest, hoping to awake before the sun rose.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: Peregrination**

The crunch of snow, grayed by soot, under her worn boots created an andante tempo as she tramped along the road beneath the snowdrift. Sara pulled her gloved right hand meticulously from its home in the pocket of her winter jacket up towards her face. She adjusted her scarf, attempting to protect her features from the malicious wind, as quickly as possible before jamming her hand back into place. She lifted her head from its shelter between her hunched shoulders and craned her neck. All around her were lofty conifers, effectively blocking the majority of the wind, but even with their assistance, Sara knew she needed to find shelter soon. The only thing she had encountered so far was the rusted remains of a tandem bicycle and the occasional frozen "dinner" for the feral. She had yet to see any effective means of protection from the elements. She looked forward; hoping against hope that she may see some salvation. To her listless delight, she could determine a cluster of what seemed to be rusted cars near a bend in the road up ahead despite her deteriorating acuity. This would only provide enough shelter for a short period of time, highwaymen commonly frequented these ragtag formations in search of tactless travelers, but it was better than trying to tough it out in the wilderness.

Snow covered the road she traveled on in a thick ashen blanket. Sara tried to deter her mind from what had caused these particles, but she could not hold back the visions of cities, towns, people, flora and fauna being razed as they filled her mind's eye. Fire was indiscriminate after all. Its burning temperatures could sear flesh in an instant, yet its gentle warmth was one of the few reasons Sara was not frozen to the worm-eaten floorboards of some abandoned homestead.

"We humans once had a love affair with fire_._" Sara thought as she shook her head, trying to clear her head of its morbid fixation. Trudging onward, she tried to keep a positive mindset as she estimated how far away she was from the collection of vehicles. However, she knew that if she kept this pace she would not make it in time for a significant amount of rest and so she sped up her gait. As she tried to lose herself in the monotonous sound of her steps to keep her attention away from her surely frostbitten appendages, she heard another noise break this pattern. She shifted her head towards the source of the noise and her gaze fell to her own feet. Stuck underneath the heel of her right boot was a paper, fighting tumultuously against its captor. Curiosity filled the void in her mind as she bent down to free the item. Before looking at what she held in her gloved hand, she swept her view around the surrounding area. She jogged off of the road in search of its origin, speculating that this could insinuate other persons nearby. She advanced further from the street as she noticed, to her right was a green object sticking out of a snow bank in a lackadaisical manner near the edge of the adjacent forest. She focused on that object alone, thankful that it was on her favored side, and came to a conclusion as to the object's identity.

The snow neighboring the object, which she had discerned to be a military issue duffel bag, had been flattened by the paws of some creature, scraps of the object's green material and conspicuous red stains splayed about the area. The side of the container, or what was left of it, was lying in tatters and its contents had been spilled onto the snow. Sara assumed that this paper had come from this bag; she returned to the false safety of the road, sincerely wishing that whatever had caused this mayhem had left the area and was slightly less sanguinary. She redirected her concentration once more to the piece of paper and, after adjusting the sunglasses precariously placed upon the bridge of her nose, began to read the faded text neatly printed upon it.

The paper before her was an advertisement for a survivalist class located in the city of Baudette, Minnesota, a city that she had passed through a few days ago when she crossed the International Boundary. It was bleakly designed, the majority of it monochrome with foreboding words boldfaced in an exaggerated manner.

"They didn't need much else," Sara surmised as she scanned the ad swiftly, "Anything claiming to help the masses survive was enough to grab anyone's attention near the end, even Tegan."

With a quick flick of her wrist she cast the paper aside and began her trek once more as nostalgia recalled memories to the forefront of her mind.


End file.
